I have 2 computers. Computer A is a Compaq, 500MHZ processor
speed, 256MB ram, 17GB active hard drive and a 20GB second hard drive,
Win98SE is installed on the active hard drive. I use the second hard drive
as a backup for important files and I keep an “image file” of the main hard
drive as a restore in case it should quit working. I use “Norton Ghost 2003” for
doing the image file backups to the second hard drive.
The second computer B is a Seanix, 2GB processor speed, 512MB ram,
80GB hard drive, Win98SE installed. It has just the operating system installed
and whatever that is included with the OS. This is a newer and far better machine
than my original computer A. What would be the simplest way to transfer the
contents of the hard drive from Computer A to the much larger hard drive on
]Computer B without losing any data and settings?
Both have CD-RW drives installed.

put the 17gb too run the new computer and use the 80 gb for backup and important files

I would try using the Ghost image to restore all of the programs and settings that you had on the 500MHz PC onto the much better 2GHz one. Anything that wasn't included in the Ghost image would have to be burned onto CD and transferred manually.

Bear in mind that the Ghost image will have drivers relevant to the old PC. Once restored onto the new PC, it might give you a bunch of 'blue screen' errors or fatal errors that stop it from booting up. If it does boot up, then you will (at the very least) need to let it install the drivers that are relevant to the new PC. You may be prompted to insert driver CDs for the hardware inside the new PC, e.g. the motherboard / chipset, graphics card, sound card, modem, etc.

It's not an especially straightforward task, whichever way you do it. Windows XP has a "Files And Settings Transfer Wizard" specifically to resolve the difficulties associated with getting all of your settings off of your old PC and onto your new one.

Thanks for the quick reply DJ. I can now see that it could be a big problem to copy the drive to the faster machine. I still have one question. There is a win98SE OS installed on the faster machine including all necessary drivers. Would I have to format the drive and remove the OS and drivers that are installed or could I just copy over top of the Win98SE that is already installed? If so would the device drivers conflict and cause problems?

If you restored the Ghost image onto the hard disk in the new PC, it would be automatically wiped before it restored the files from the old PC onto the new one.

Originally Posted by jak1936

.....could I just copy over top of the Win98SE that is already installed?

If you were to literally do a Windows file copy (e.g. through Windows Explorer), then you'd find that it kept stopping when it reached one of the many files that were already in use and couldn't be overwritten. If you were to rig it up so that you had the hard disk from the old PC running as a slave drive in the new PC, then you could boot the new PC up using a boot disk and then use XCOPY to transfer everything over from the slave drive to the new drive. That's not quite such a "clean" method of doing it as using the Ghost image because you'll end up with the Windows install from the old PC with bits of the installation from the new PC mingling around in the middle somewhere. It might not work at all and it is unlikely that it would retain all of the drivers from the new PC's install. Resolving the issues from doing this would probably take longer than installing all the software and settings from the original CDs.

Incidentally, when Windows 98 was being written, it wasn't intended to be run on a PC as fast as 2.0GHz and with as much memory as 512MB RAM. The minimum system requirements are a 0.066GHz processor and 24MB RAM! You might even find that 512MB RAM actually makes it run slower than if you had 256MB. Windows XP will generally run much better on any Pentium 4 PC with 256MB RAM or more.

..... and I'm not just saying that because I'm a youngster that doesn't know any better. I used to love Windows 98 but times they are a-changing!